Even though the percentage growth has slowed over the last several years, the IP provider niche has clearly emerged as a significant revenue contributor to the overall electronic design automation marketplace.

Delving Deeper

To probe further into the IP provider market niche, we have arbitrarily selected eight (8) publicly-traded companies (hereinafter known as the "Group-of-8" or "G8"), as representative of the current state of the electronics IP industry.

Group-of-8 (G8):

ARM Holdings, plc

Cambridge, UK

Artisan Components, Inc.

Sunnyvale, CA

LogicVision, Inc.

San Jose, CA

MIPS Technologies, Inc.

Mountain View, CA

Monolithic System Technology, Inc.

Sunnyvale, CA

ParthusCeva, Inc.

San Jose, CA

Rambus, Inc.

Los Altos, CA

Virage Logic Corp.

Fremont, CA

For the G8 companies above, we will assume that all of their revenues are electronics IP and directly-related IP services.

How has the Group-of-8 (G8) IP providers performed financially?

Figure 2 lists the revenue records of the selected G8 IP providers for 2001 and 2002. Based on this set of numbers, three of the companies (Artisan, Monolithic and VirageLogic) showed substantial percentage revenue growth, one grew only slightly (ARM), and four (LogicVision, MIPS, ParthusCeva, and Rambus) were down year-over-year.

The full Group-of-8 revenues were relatively flat between 2001 and 2002.